Christopher Anderson, born in western Canada and raised in west Texas, made his name in 1999 by climbing aboard a handmade wooden boat with forty-four Haitians trying to reach Florida. The boat sank in the Caribbean, the coast guard pulled them out, and the pictures won him the Robert Capa Gold Medal. In the years that followed he photographed Gaza, Afghanistan after 9/11 and Chávez's Venezuela; he joined Magnum in 2005 and became the first photographer in residence at New York Magazine.
Then, in 2008, Atlas was born, his first child. Not long after, Anderson's father was diagnosed with lung cancer. He had never once turned the camera on his own house; he started almost without noticing, trying not to lose any of what was happening, and for two years he went on treating those pictures as something that had nothing to do with his work. Then he understood that they were exactly his work, and that everything before had been a way of getting there.
The book lives inside that double movement: while he is learning to be a father, he goes back to being the son.
Kehrer published it in 2013. Stanley/Barker remade it in 2021 with eighty extra pages: Atlas is ten years older, and in the afterword Anderson writes that the first time round, the son in the title was him.